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How would you like 5 of SitePoint’s rather fine technical publications for just $29.99 US? Sounds like an absolute bargain, doesn’t it? Well, it is a deal not to be missed and you have 3 days to make the most of it. So get to it!

As a SitePoint author whose books are on this list, it’s money out of my pocket, frankly, so why should I be so happily promoting it? Simple - the money is going into the pockets of people who need it a hell of a lot more than I and the other SitePoint authors and employees need it right now!. As some of you might know, SitePoint is based in Melbourne, Australia where - at the time of writing - bush fires are still raging and have claimed entire towns with the loss of life currently put at 170 people. This figure will rise.

I know that some of the people at SitePoint have been personally affected, losing friends in the fires, so this should not be seen as a publicity stunt in any way shape or form - this was simply something that they could do to raise some money quickly and easily to support the victims of this tragic incident. I’m only too happy to help promote this and am going to be blogging this anywhere I can, Twittering where I can - and there’s nothing to stop you doing the same!

$30 for five books is an absolute steal. Go on, buy some books and that will be another $30 going directly towards the victims - SitePoint are taking no money from this whatsoever.

OK, before I start, let me just emphasise that this tool is not meant to be anything complicated and I’m not suggesting that it in any way replaces other existing ‘Swiss Army knife’ style captioning tools - this is a one-trick pony! And the trick this pony does is help to caption YouTube videos. If you’re expecting something mind-blowing, prepare to be disappointed (cue smiley face icon moment).

What it does

I’ve put together a little tool that lets me create a caption file - suitable for YouTube - in what I think is a quite easy manner. You need to have a transcript done first (that’s the hardest part!), but if you have that, the aim is to make it a case of listening to the narrative in the YouTube video and then pressing the ‘a’ key button when each line in the transcript appears which then time-stamps that line for you.

What it doesn’t do

Pressing the play button on the embedded YouTube video does not automatically start the timer required for time-stamping the caption text (because pressing play is not tha same as the bideo starting due to connection speed and how long it takes to buffer video, so there is s separate timer control. This is far from perfect. What I would like is:

for a control on the page to start the YouTube video loading/buffering

listen/wait for the video to actually start playing

trigger off the timer so the two are in sync

This sounds do-able, but I’ll confess I’ve never tinkered with YouTube API at all. What I would appreciate is any advice on that front, even if it’s just to say "Yes, that’s possible, take a look here" … and I’ll give it a look when I get a moment free

If anyone is receiving spam emails notifying about private messages, please note that this is not something that I can help you with. Accessify.com is my site, but accessifyforum.com is owned/maintained by Nigel Peck, which he set up using that URL/name with my blessing way back in the days (it’s more of a partnership link arrangement). If you are getting these spam emails or are having any other problems related to accessifyforum, please contact Nigel directly. If that contact link doesn’t work for you, please drop me a line and I’ll find another contact point for him.

I’m hoping to secure a few copies for a little prize giveaway, so watch this space. We’ll also be publishing an extract from the book soon, but have not got confirmation on the chapter just yet (somewhat ironically, it’s likely to be in PDF format, so I hope that the authors are able to encourage O’Reilly to make it nice and accessible!)